Samaritan Aramaic | |
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ארמית Arāmît, ܐܪܡܝܐ Ārāmāyâ | |
Pronunciation | [arɑmiθ], [arɑmit], [ɑrɑmɑjɑ], [ɔrɔmɔjɔ] |
Spoken in | Israel and Palestinian Authority territories, predominantly in Samaria and Holon. |
Native speakers | fewer than 1,000; liturgical only (date missing) |
Language family | |
Writing system | Samaritan alphabet |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-2 | sam |
ISO 639-3 | sam |
Samaritan Aramaic, or Samaritan, is the dialect of Aramaic used by the Samaritans in their sacred and scholarly literature. This should not be confused with the Samaritan Hebrew language of the Scriptures. It ceased to be a spoken language some time between the 10th and the 12th centuries.
In form it resembles the Aramaic of the Targumim, the Aramaic word for “interpretation” or “paraphrase”, and is written in the Samaritan alphabet.
Important works written in Samaritan include the Samaritan translation of the Samaritan Hebrew Pentateuch in the form of the targum paraphrased version. There are also legal, exegetical and liturgical texts, though later works of the same kind were often written in Arabic.
Exodus XX.1-6:
Notice the similarities with Judeo-Aramaic as found in Targum Onqelos to this same passage (some expressions below are paraphrased, not literally translated):
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